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The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum QUOTES

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum QUOTES

1 " Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, “Oh, he has autism. That’s the problem”—and then he didn’t treat the GI problem. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

2 " In dealing with autism, I'm certainly not saying we should lose sight of the need to work on deficits, But the focus on deficits is so intense and so automatic that people lose sight of the strengths. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

3 " Neuroanatomy isn't destiny. Neither is genetics. They don't define who you will be. But they do define who you might be. They define who you can be. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

4 " Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled—a project he’d worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That’s why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

5 " When something is "all in your mind," people tend to think that it's willful, that it's something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I'm hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

6 " Kanner had cause and effect backward. The child wasn’t behaving in a psychically isolated or physically destructive manner because the parents were emotionally distant. Instead, the "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

7 " The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

8 " Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

9 " but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.” Behavior that looks antisocial to an outsider might actually be an expression of fear. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

10 " By cultivating the autistic mind on a brain-by-brain, strength-by-strength basis, we can reconceive autistic teens and adults in jobs and internships not as charity cases but as valuable, even essential, contributors to society. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

11 " The younger the subject, the earlier the possibility of intervention. The earlier the intervention, the greater the potential effect on the trajectory of an autistic person’s life. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

12 " In 2010 I underwent a series of MRI scans at the University of Utah. One finding was particularly gratifying. Remember that when I pointed out the size difference in my ventricles to the researchers after my first MRI, back in 1987, they told me that some asymmetry in the brain was to be expected? Well, the University of Utah study showed that my left ventricle is 57 percent longer than my right. That’s huge. In the control subjects, the difference between left and right was only 15 percent. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

13 " Baron-Cohen. In 2001, he and his colleagues at the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, England, introduced the autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

14 " Attention-shifting slowness. Once a sound has my attention, I have trouble letting go and moving on to the next sound. If a mobile phone rings during one of my talks, it totally disrupts my train of thought; it grabs my attention, and my ability to shift back is slower than most people’s. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

15 " And just to complicate matters, autistic people seem to get visual cues mixed up with aural cues. Normally when a person is listening, the visual cortex gets turned down. But a 2012 fMRI study found that when autistics were listening to sound cues, their visual cortices remained more active than neurotypicals’. If that’s the case, then even while they’re straining to process aural cues, they’re being distracted and confused by visual cues. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

16 " Research has also shown that when performing language tasks, the autistic subject relies on the visual and spatial areas of the brain more heavily than the neurotypical subject does, perhaps to compensate for a lack of the kind of semantic knowledge that comes with social interaction "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

17 " I feel that my local bias frees me from the global bias that gets in the way of top-down thinkers. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

18 " During meals, I was taught table manners, and I was not allowed to twirl my fork around over my head. The only time I could revert back to autism was for one hour after lunch. The rest of the day, I had to live in a nonrocking, nontwirling world. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

19 " The idea that hyperreactivity and hyporeactivity are two variations on a theme might even have implications for theory of mind. The “Intense World” paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren’t. “Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality, but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.” Behavior that looks antisocial to an outsider might actually be an expression of fear. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

20 " Do not allow a child or an adult to become defined by a DSM label. "

― Temple Grandin , The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum